I, like many other netizens, am a fan of the website FMyLife. FMyLife is a site for posting personal grievances that purportedly show how “f***ed” one’s life is. Boing Boing uses the quote “Capsule-sized doses of schadenfreude to help you feel better about your life any time you need it,” to describe the site. The items there consist of everything from silly but embarrassing events, to just plain gross things, to crushingly unfair parents, and to terribly serious wrongdoing. While looking through the archives, I ran across a troubling entry that has to do with Twilight.

FML link comes from a guy who got dumped because his girlfriend wanted someone more like Edward, the fictional vampire. Now, I think the majority of complaints about Twilight for sexism are overblown, but the fact is that Edward is based on this sort of bad-boy ideal (like, ‘he’s a monster, and he wants to hurt me on some level, but he never will because he loves me’) that just doesn’t really exist in the real world. It may be fine for men of fantasy like Edward, or for another example the Phantom of the Opera, but any person in the real world who approaches this ideal will probably just be abusive. All FML entries have to be taken with a grain of salt, but given the widespread Twilight craze I think it may be either real or approaching reality enough to warrant looking at its content seriously.